Ghost stories from Kentucky

The Flicker in the Hall

I’ve always been the practical one, the one who checks the locks and the stove burners. My sister, Mira, she’s the dreamer, the one who sees shapes in clouds and...

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The Hinge That Remembers

I’ve learned that new houses aren’t clean slates. They’re more like sponges, soaking up whatever happens inside them, and if something bad happens early, it stains everything that follows. Our...

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The Looming Oak

Mara, a single mother of three, had finally saved enough to move her family out of their cramped apartment into a real house. It was an old Victorian on the...

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The Porcelain Church

My cousin Lena and I had never given it much thought—we were only six, after all. It was summer, and the long, sunbaked days stretched endlessly before us. Our usual...

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The Giggling Lady of Cedar Falls

My family moved to Cedar Falls when I was eight, into a sprawling old house that had been converted into four apartments. The landlords, an elderly couple, lived downstairs, and...

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The Saffron Lantern

The night we found the lantern, the air in the orchard smelled of rotting apples and ozone, like a storm that never broke. I was with my brother, Elias, and...

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The Closet’s Hunger

The last time we set foot in that derelict wing of St. Jude’s Asylum, we were chasing whispers. Now, six months later, we returned with a medium and a fool’s...

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The Root Cellar’s Debt

The stairs to the root cellar were always a little crooked, but that night they felt like they were tilting inward, as if the house itself was trying to swallow...

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The Blood in the Joists

My grandmother’s cabin sat at the edge of a redwood forest, where the trees pressed so close that the sun only reached the porch in thin, amber slats. I remember...

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The Last Tidy

Uncle Ray never talked much about his years on the road, but one story surfaced on a cold November night when the bourbon was flowing and the fire was low....

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The Xerox in Ward 4

My first week at the Harlow County Administrative Annex was a lesson in the particular dread of fluorescent lights buzzing over linoleum at seven in the evening. The building, a...

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The Dry Erase Marker

It was the last day of junior year, and the four of us—Mara, Dex, Sloane, and I—had skipped the final assembly to smoke cheap cigarettes behind the gym. The air...

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The Blue Static on Channel 13

I never planned to tell anyone about the visions. They started, I think, with the radio in my grandpa’s barn—a battered old Philco that crackled with weather reports from thirty...

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The Pixelated Goblins

When I was twelve, my family lived in a house that had a strange crawlspace under the stairs. It was always drafty, and we kept it locked because of the...

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The Ledger of Static

I moved into the old Cartwright house when I was sixteen, after my parents’ divorce split our lives like a cracked mirror. The house sat at the end of a...

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The Sigil of the Swarm

In the quiet coastal town of Porthallow, where the sea mist crept through cobblestone streets like a living thing, Elara and her partner, Marcus, shared a fascination with the arcane....

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The Static Man

I should have known better than to think the silence would last. After the first incident—the misty shape in the hallway, the TV turning on by itself—I convinced myself it...

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The Thirteen-Year Click

My grandmother, Elara, found the dog on the shoulder of the old county road that wound past her farmhouse, a matted, trembling heap of fur and bones. She carried it...

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The Tug at the Collar

We inherited the old farmhouse from my husband’s great-aunt, a woman we barely knew. The place was a time capsule, filled with dusty furniture and the smell of dried lavender....

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The Poltergeist of Ashworth Hall

The first signs were so subtle that Marcus chalked them up to his own exhaustion. He and his roommate, Alex, had moved into Ashworth Hall, a sprawling Victorian-era dormitory known...

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The Cerulean Room

The night before I met my boyfriend Leo’s parents for the first time, I had a dream that I died. But it wasn’t the death part that stayed with me;...

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The Lace Garden

The house was a Victorian fossil, sunk into the weedy lot on the edge of Salt Creek. My mother, a woman of quiet superstitions inherited from her Appalachian kin, had...

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The Constant Attic Creak

My grandmother’s house is a mausoleum of creaking floorboards and stale air. It used to be a funeral home, but now it’s just a museum of grief, with rooms full...

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